Where the hours go in a small FM team: vehicle time adds up

A detailed time study of small FM teams shows that vehicle administration, maintenance coordination and breakdown response account for a surprisingly large share of weekly hours. Tasks such as licence checking, service booking, fuel-card reconciliation, insurance claims and defect reporting often fall to office staff or supervisors, diverting attention from core service delivery and client relationship management.

For lean FM operations, every hour counts. When a team of five spends half a day per week wrestling with fleet admin, that's 10 per cent of capacity lost to tasks that could be handled by better systems or outsourced altogether. The hidden cost isn't just time—it's the client calls not returned, the site visits not made and the operational improvements not implemented because people are firefighting vehicle issues.

Automating licence checks, consolidating suppliers and using a single point of contact for all fleet matters can recover significant capacity. Many small FM businesses assume fleet management requires in-house control, but the reverse is often true: outsourcing the admin while retaining operational oversight frees the team to focus on what differentiates the business in a competitive market.

Bluepoppy handles the entire fleet lifecycle for FM and service businesses, freeing your team to do what they do best. Our Fleet Cost Review includes a time-cost audit to show you exactly where hours are going—and how to get them back. Let's discuss how we can lighten the load.

Bluepoppy view: Fleet admin shouldn't steal time from the work that wins you clients.

Source: FMUK Online — summarised and written from a Bluepoppy perspective. We don’t reproduce the original article.